Bradford v. Davis, No. 15-99018 (9th Cir. 2019)
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Petitioner challenged the district court's limited grant of habeas relief as to his death sentence and the state cross-appealed. Petitioner was convicted of first-degree murder, first-degree robbery, rape, and sodomy. The Ninth Circuit vacated the district court's grant of habeas relief, finding that the California Supreme Court did not unreasonably apply clearly established federal law and that its holdings were not contrary to federal law.
The panel held that petitioner has shown cause to overcome the procedural default of his claims for ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct for the suppression of his toxicology test results. Therefore, the panel remanded for the district court to consider whether petitioner has established prejudice as to either claim. Finally, the panel declined to expand the certificate of appealability to include petitioner's uncertified claims.
Court Description: Habeas Corpus / Death Penalty. The panel affirmed the district court’s denial of habeas relief as to one of Mark Alan Bradford’s claims regarding his conviction, reversed the district court’s procedural- default holding as to two claims regarding his conviction, remanded for the district court to consider whether Bradford established prejudice as to those two claims, and on the State of California’s cross appeal, reversed the district court’s grant of a conditional writ of habeas corpus as to Bradford’s death sentence. The panel held that California’s timeliness rule for habeas petitions – pursuant to which the California Supreme Court denied as untimely Bradford’s claims for prosecutorial misconduct for suppression of toxicology test results (Claim 4), prosecutorial misconduct for suppression of notes from witness interviews conducted by police (Claim 6), and ineffective assistance of counsel for failure to present a mental state defense of intoxication (Claim 8) – was adequate when Bradford filed his state habeas petition on January 6, 2000. In so holding, the panel rejected Bradford’s contention that the adequacy of the timeliness rule should be analyzed as of June 3, 1996, the date upon which his claims fell outside the 90-day timeliness presumption. The panel wrote that this conclusion is not altered because Bradford did not file a state habeas petition until after filing his federal petition, and that, in order to obtain federal habeas review,
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